We lived in Jackson, Minnesota, when I was born; all four of my brothers were born there, too. Our house was the second-to-the-last one on Branch Street, a small gravel road in the shadow of the grain elevators. The elevators are on the northeast side of town, an area that used to have more going for it than it does now.  

Back then, there was a café across from the elevators called the Farmer’s Café. Not a very creative name, but it suited its purpose. Farmers and truck drivers were its main customers, with occasional visits by locals looking for a cup of coffee and a slice of pie in the late morning or mid-afternoon. The railroad tracks ran alongside the elevators, but I don’t recall ever seeing trains go through. The thing I remember most about the elevators is the pigeons.

Our house was about fifty yards from the elevators, and the sound of pigeons cooing and flying between them, their wings echoing as they flapped, was easily heard anywhere along Branch Street. Even though I was only four when we moved away, four times 365 days is 1,460 days of hearing the pigeons up in the elevators. That can leave an impression. My wife and I stayed at a bed-and-breakfast located just a hundred yards up the hill from the tracks – the Railroad Inn, which has unfortunately since closed. We sat out on the porch, and I was transported back to my childhood, listening to the pigeons as they flew between the elevators, their sounds echoing as the tall, round structures reflected and bounced the noise, giving the birds’ sounds an echoey, ethereal quality. Something in that sound affected me like playing a recording of a mother’s heartbeat for a newborn. Science says a newborn is accustomed to hearing the mother’s heartbeat, so its presence is calming to them after being thrust into the bright, hard, cold world where we live. The pigeon sounds gave me a similar feeling.

Our house on Branch Street was next door to Grandma and Grandpa Zimmy's, my dad’s parents. In case you’re wondering, I didn’t give them the nickname Zimmy; it’s a natural nickname for someone named Zimmerli, usually either Zim or Zimmy. When my dad, Jacob Wesley Zimmerli, returned from World War II, he started Zimmy’s Taxi Cab. When I was old enough to have a nickname at school, it was the shorter version: Zim. But in Jackson, everyone called my dad Zimmy. I can still hear my uncle, Floyd Henrichs, calling him “Zimmy.” He had a distinct way of saying it that has stuck with me. Most people called my dad Wes, so hearing him called Zimmy was always a little funny. It was almost like they were sharing a private joke. Maybe they did—after all, they were married to sisters. 

In his memoir about his experiences on Leyte and Okinawa during World War II, my dad wrote that everyone in his company called him either Jake or Zimmy. I don’t know if he had always been called Zimmy or if that was something new that came from living close to a hundred other guys while someone was trying to kill you. Zimmy was a nickname, a familiar moniker, even one of affection, and for some of the guys in his unit, their nicknames were quicker to say than their real names. 

Grandpa and Grandma lived in the last house on Branch Street. Grandpa bought it in 1937 when my dad was in seventh grade. You had to turn around at their house because the road dead-ended there due to a deep ravine and the lack of a bridge. Beyond the ravine, there were only woods. When you reached the end of Branch Street, you could either pull to the left and park by the house or turn right to park behind Grandpa’s garage. There was also some space to park between their house and ours, and I’m sure it was used often. 

I remember Grandpa and Grandma’s house much more clearly than ours, probably because I was too young when we lived there, and I spent more time in their house than in ours. We moved away when I was four, but Grandma and Grandpa stayed for many years afterward. When we lived on Branch Street, my world was limited to my immediate surroundings and Grandma’s house. There were three entrances to the house: the one in the back that we usually used, which led through the kitchen so we could be hugged by Grandma Zimmy; the one that led into the living room (which was actually the true front door); and a third one on the side that was the private entrance to the upstairs apartment. 

I don’t remember anyone living upstairs, but I’ve heard from several people who said they lived in the apartment “over Becky and Pop Zimmerli’s house.” My mom and dad lived there when they first got married, and other relatives used the space because it was close to Grandma’s cooking. We usually went upstairs to explore during family gatherings. We often got into trouble for going up there, which probably meant someone was living there. We would sneak up via the staircase off Grandma and Grandpa’s bedroom.

I don’t know why we thought it was so cool up there. Most of my memories are of a small bathroom at the top of the stairs, a tiny kitchen and dining area, a sitting room, and a bedroom. My memories might be completely wrong, but that’s what I remember. It was a place where we could play away from the grown-ups, at least until someone yelled at us to go outside and play.

Downstairs, the kitchen was always filled with the richest smells. Depending on the holiday, you’d be surrounded by the scents of baking turkey, chicken, and ham, along with fresh dinner rolls that had a yeasty aroma almost as delightful as the rolls themselves. Cakes, pies, breads, and cookies were made in that kitchen at a pace that would make most bakeries envious. 

The living room was just off the kitchen, and Uncle James often had a cigar lit. The men would be deep in discussion about crops, farm machinery, and other masculine topics, but I was just a little kid and didn’t hang out there enough to know what they were talking about. To this day, the smell of a cigar brings me back to the living room at Grandma and Grandpa’s, hearing men’s voices, their deep laughs, and the phlegmy coughs that came with smoking and inhaling chemicals meant to produce a bigger, better, and stronger cigar crop.

There was a hallway off the kitchen at a right angle to the living room. You entered the house from outside, placed your food in the kitchen after hugging Grandma, and then the men went straight through to the living room. Kids usually turned around and went back outside to play. But if you turned right and went down the short hallway from the kitchen, you found the “spare bedroom,” the bathroom, and Grandma and Grandpa’s bedroom. 

Just inside the hallway as you leave the kitchen, there was a dark wood buffet on the left. There might also have been a ‘secretary,’ a wooden shelf unit with a drop-down table and cubbies inside for paper, stamps, pens, and other writing supplies. On one of the two wooden pieces of furniture was an orange. It was not an ordinary orange. It had been completely covered with cloves, each pounded into the rind, giving the orange a tough, bumpy brown surface, almost scratchy to the touch. It smelled of citrus and cloves and weighed almost nothing. It was bone-dry, and as it dried, it tightened, bringing the cloves closer together, making it sturdier and more permanent. I loved the smell of that dried orange! I asked where it had come from, and my dad said he had made it when he was young. That meant it was over thirty years old when I found it. I have considered making one myself, but the price of that many whole cloves is rather prohibitive.

The spare room wasn’t truly a bedroom so much as a place where someone had simply placed a bed. Yes, there was a bed, a dresser, and a window between them, but no door. There might have been a curtain on a rod that you could pull for privacy, but solitude was more a concept than a reality. Above the bed was a picture that would haunt me for years. It’s supposed to be a comforting image, but it had the opposite effect on me. It showed a young boy and girl—brother and sister, I assume—on a bridge, with a giant angel looming over them. I understand the idea of a guardian angel and “angels watching over you,” but this angel made me think of a vampire about to make lunch out of Hansel and Gretel. Irrational? Maybe. But it’s my memory and my interpretation of what I saw hanging over the bed in that dark room. (My wife bought me a copy of that picture years later. It hangs on a wall in our bedroom, near a window with plenty of sunlight streaming in. Vampires can’t stand the sunlight, you know.)

Just to be clear, much of what I remember is from after we moved away from Jackson, not from while we lived there. It’s all part of my childhood, which isn’t neatly confined to years and months but to wisps of memory paired with tastes, smells, and textures that evoke deeper feelings and memories. 

Branch Street had four houses when I was born. By 2021, it still had three. In the late 1950s, Grandpa and Grandma Zimmy anchored the street at the end, then our house, followed by Dad’s brother Dana, his wife Dorothy, and their son Wayne occupying the third house. The last house belonged to a ‘cousin,’ Joseph Benjamin Mier, though I never heard him called anything but Benny or Ben. My dad’s sister, Twyla, married Ray Mier, and Ben was Ray’s older brother, which made Ben a cousin in a broad sense. Family wasn’t defined solely by strict bloodlines and family trees. Our extended family stretched as far as needed. 

Once, Ben and I walked along the railroad tracks when I was probably three or four. We didn’t go very far, just over to “Little Nels’s” place. By the way, Nels is a man’s name, not like little Nell with blonde pigtails.

Nels’s house was a half block down the street from the café across from the elevators, if you walked on the sidewalk. But we walked on the railroad tracks, behind the houses, emerging at Nels’s house. I think Nels smoked a pipe filled with cherry-flavored tobacco. Whenever I try to access this memory, I always get a mental whiff of cherry tobacco. It’s possibly a manufactured memory, pieced together from multiple encounters with different people. Honestly, I don’t remember the man at all, and I can’t bring up any pictures of Ben in my mind either. What I do remember is that Nels had a refrigerator, and from that white icebox, he pulled out a box of cookies and handed me one. I had never had one before: a Fig Newton. It was probably one of my first store-bought cookies. I don’t remember much, but I do recall that I liked it. Fig Newtons, pipe smoke, and walking on railroad ties. 

The front of Nels’s house was almost as impressive as what I was experiencing in the kitchen. I was little, and to me, it looked like his front yard was filled with billions of sculptures! There were probably ten, and they were homemade concrete pieces with colored broken glass embedded and bottle caps. Windmills and similar items. (My wife calls these pieces of Americana “yard crap.”)

I only mentioned people on one side of Branch Street, not because we couldn’t play with the kids on the other side, but because there was only one side. Moore Street went past the elevators, and Branch Street veered to the left. Moore Street continued up the hill, making a slight curve to the right, as if a farmer had plowed a field that followed the terrain. Moore Street went up the hill, angling toward the east-northeast, creating a triangle-shaped lot. That triangle was Grandpa Zimmy’s “garden.” 

We moved “way up north” (68 miles away), from Branch Street to Redwood Falls in the fall of 1961. I was four years old and still too young to start school. This was during the days when children could play outside and learn at their own pace, rather than being enrolled in Pre-K to get a head start on their classmates. Little did they know that I had already mastered nap and snack time!

Time can be cruel to our memories. Grandpa and Grandma Zimmy’s house was used as a training exercise by the local fire department, probably ten or twenty years after they moved down the hill from Branch Street. The house next door where we lived was remodeled and expanded, and a couple of garages were built on the lot where Grandma and Grandpa’s house once stood. Dana and Dorothy’s house was also remodeled sometime in the last thirty years. Surprisingly, Ben’s house still looks almost the same, even though he’s been gone for many years. His was the one I thought would be gone first. 

We lived in Jackson, Minnesota, when I was born; all four of my brothers were born there, too. Our house was the second-to-last on Branch Street, a small gravel road in the shadow of the grain elevators. The elevators are on the northeast side of town, an area that used to have more going for it than it does now. Any of us grandchildren could tell you that it had good soil for growing vegetables. I believe Grandpa would approve, too.

MKZ 

Copyright © 2026 Michael Zimmerli - All Rights Reserved.

The Young Boy and the Sea

Once upon a time, there was a small boy with a small toy boat. The boy loved his little toy boat and played with it outside in the shallow puddles left by a passing storm, and he loved to play with it in the bathtub, too. Then one day, his parents took him to the “ocean.” 

It was the largest puddle the boy had ever seen. His boat worked fine in the puddles he could find outside after a rain shower, and it sailed ever-so-gloriously in the deeper water of the bathtub. So upon seeing the unending body of water stretching out before him, he thought to himself, ‘Just think how much better our boat could sail in such a large puddle.’ 

Unfortunately, there was no sandy beach where the boy’s parents took him; there were only big rocks, and large, noisy waves crashed against them, sending spray shooting up into the air toward anyone who came too close. The cold spray discouraged anyone from getting too close. 

Besides, the boy knew there was no way his mother would let him get anywhere near the water. So, how could he get close enough to sail his treasured toy? First, he tried the usual tactic of every small child: the direct approach. He just headed straight for the rocks, waves, and spray. Nope. Dad intercepted him easily with one hand and turned him around, sending him away from the beckoning water. But this was a boy with a purpose. 

He had to get that boat on the water where it could really sail, and in the process, his mind’s eye would accompany it. He would imagine himself standing on the deck of his vessel and guiding it through the waves and safely into port. 

Time to try again. Just walk slowly and calmly toward the water’s edge. Mom and Dad were leaning against the boardwalk’s railing, making stupid grown-up talk. Each time a particularly large wave crashed, Mom made a surprised sound, her eyes flashed, and she and Dad both laughed. They only had eyes for each other. No one was watching the boy. He told himself, ‘Stay calm. Just keep walking.’ 

“Bark! Bark, bark, bark,” came his dad’s voice. Against the noisy backdrop of the waves, Dad’s voice was reduced to a basic, feral feeling. The words were lost, and his message became nothing more than a tonal command, but the message was unmistakable: Get away from the water or you’ll sit in the car! 

Score 2 for Dad, none for the boy and his boat.

The boy could feel that time was running out. They were going to leave soon, and he would have to get back in the car without sailing his boat in the real ocean, the place real boats were supposed to be. Desperation seized him. He knew he had to time everything perfectly to make his plan work. 

He would pretend he’d lost interest in the ocean. He could throw cigarette butts at the seagulls to find out how stupid they are. They weren’t. (Somehow, a seagull can tell the difference in the air between popcorn and a cigarette butt.)

The boy played with rocks, throwing some pebbles at the seagulls. It was amazing how they could avoid them, even at point-blank range. 

He waited for the right moment. Then Dad turned his back. This was it.

Jumping up from his seat on the ground, the boy’s little legs pumped, his feet planted one in front of the other, his arms whirling like a windmill gone wild. The spray of ocean waves wet his face as he clutched his toy boat, but he barely noticed. 

Suddenly, Dad saw him, and the footrace began. Dad was closing fast, but the boy already had a good lead on him. The boy could hear his father’s feet coming ever closer, closer. As he ran unsteadily over the rocky shore, the boy cocked his arm back like a quarterback and threw with all his might. But not a rock. He was launching his boat. 

The bright red-and-yellow toy flew through the air, tumbling end over end before landing with a very small splash in the water. The boy stopped in his tracks just a half an instant before Dad caught him and scooped him up. The boy barely noticed, his eyes fixed on the progress of his boat. He had done it!

The boat rose with the swell of a wave, then slid down the backside, moving away from the rocks, moving away from the boy. He did it! He was sailing his boat on the ocean. 

Out and out it went, further and further from shore, carried down the backside of each wave. It was free to roam the seas, skippered by the little boy in his mind’s eye. He imagined himself walking the shifting deck and shouting orders to his crew as the waves sent spray blasting up the sides of the boat, arcing over the boy-captain’s head and then fanning out and falling in a rainbow-studded mist.

Except that’s not quite how it ended. 

The “ocean” was actually Lake Superior, and the little boy was my son (now 15), with his little red-and-yellow plastic tugboat. We were at Duluth’s Canal Park, and he had thrown his boat into the bay, and it was being carried out to sea. But the boy was not barking orders to his imaginary crew as they manned his red-and-yellow toy. Instead, he was crying very loudly because his boat was going away, and there was nothing I could do to change that. It was one of those moments all fathers face.

The loss of a toy may seem like a small thing to a grownup, but it can feel huge to a child. Fathers want to be able to fix any situation, especially something as small as a lost toy, but there are times we can’t. Despite our desire for our families to believe we are superheroes, it turns out we have feet of clay. When a situation arises – like the lost toy boat that exposes our inability to do the impossible – our usual response is to get mad and tell the child he shouldn’t have done it in the first place. We say, “he’ll just have to live with it.” We throw in things like, loss builds characteror He’ll think first next time. You know, that sort of thing. That’s what we fathers do and say. What we’d really like to do is dive into the water, rescue the stupid boat, help your child stop crying, and maintain his belief in your power to fix anything.

That day at Canal Park, we made some ineffective, unsuccessful attempts to get the little tugboat back. We mainly tried steering it back to shore by creating waves on the far side of the boat by throwing rocks and sticks past the boat (I said ineffective).

Our theory was that if you could create a large enough wave to counteract the natural waves, you might get the boat to start moving toward shore, and it might come close enough to reach with a stick or grab by hand. Unfortunately and predictably, none of that worked. So, we walked around Canal Park, accompanied by our small, sobbing boy, as we tried to take his mind off the traumatic experience. 

After we looked at the exhibits inside the Park’s museum, we came back outside and went down near the rocks for one last look at the “ocean” before climbing back in the car for the trip home. We walked along the boardwalk, next to the rocks, waves, and spray, when, suddenly, there it was! The familiar bright red and yellow. 

His boat had been tossed up on the rocks. A miracle, if ever there was one. We all fixed our eyes on the little toy boat, as if by staring at it we could hold it in place. We walked slowly toward it, scarcely able to believe our good fortune. But then we all stopped and stood stock-still, gaping slack-jawed as a woman scrambling on the rocks ahead of us reached down, picked up the boat, shook it for a second, then turned toward the water and tossed it back out into the bay!

My son turned into a whirlwind of fury. You could see the bloodlust in his eyes. He wanted someone to take that woman’s life for what she had done to his boat. I had to physically restrain him, pinning his little boy’s arms to his sides and lifting him up so his feet thrashed helplessly against the empty air, preventing him from finding a foothold and gaining traction. 

He looked at me, rage coloring his little face red, and shouted, “Go hit her, Daddy! Hit her hard!”

I did not hit her. I don’t even remember if I said anything to her. I think we just numbly crawled back into our car and drove the 80 miles home in utter silence, except for a few snuffles from the boy in the backseat, who finally fell asleep after the fury and adrenaline got used up.

Years have passed since that fateful day, and there have been many trips to Duluth and Canal Park, all uneventful. Yet whenever we go to Canal Park, my son still looks along the shore where his red-and-yellow tugboat went out to sea without him.

And then he throws rocks at the seagulls, imagining that each seagull is the woman who threw his boat into the water.

ZIMMY 

Copyright © 1996/2025 Michael Zimmerli. All rights reserved.

And We Laughed … 

(Originally posted in 2000)

It was one of those special moments that caught us all off guard. 

We were all convulsed with laughter, that pure laughter that makes your sides hurt and tears run freely down your cheeks. The kind of uncontrollable laughter that used to get you and your little brother in trouble during church. The kind that comes from something completely unexpected, feeds on itself, and just keeps going, like perpetual motion. The silliness that just won’t stop, perhaps because you don’t honestly want it to stop.

We were driving back from Hinckley when the giggles struck. We had gone to pick up our daughter Becca, who had just spent the weekend with her Auntie Eva (my wife’s sister). The girl was quite hyper. It’s hard to say whether it was from a large latte a half hour earlier or from a weekend filled with lattes and fun with her cool aunt. 

To provide some background, we have been attending Salem Lutheran Brethren Church for about six years. I was raised Methodist, and my wife was raised Catholic, so Lutheran seemed like a compromise. Besides, Adam’s best friend at the time was the son of Salem’s pastor. We liked the church and stayed. Becca was confirmed there in May, and she and I help lead the music on Sunday mornings. When Becca was confirmed, her speech focused on the Sacrament of Holy Communion. Consequently, she had to study the subject quite a bit to put together an A+ speech. That knowledge made the incident all the more humorous. 

We dropped Becca off Friday night in Hinckley after meeting Eva at Tobie’s Restaurant (famous for its cinnamon rolls). We agreed to meet back at Hinckley on Sunday night for supper at Subway (now with six different types of bread). We had a nice time catching up on family news with Eva, and Adam had the night off and rode with us.  

*Note: Since moving into his own apartment in April, Adam has become much more grateful for food, staples, and services. He stops by almost every day on his way to work for a bite to eat, a hug from his mom, and to tell us about new things he has learned. The funny part is that these lessons he’s learning are the same things we tried to teach him when he lived at home! Simply amazing what you learn when you have to!

On our way home, we were zipping along on I-35 when the attack came out of nowhere. Becca was telling us about the Catholic Church she and Eva had attended earlier that day. The congregation had consisted of about fifty nuns and Becca and Eva. Eva and my wife have an aunt who is a Mother Superior General. The nuns at the church knew Sister and wanted to get caught up on all the news about her. As we rode home, Becca told us about the nuns at the church and how excited they were to meet her and Eva.

She told us she had chosen not to take Communion that morning because we are not Catholic, but she discovered that staying in the pew while Eva went forward was not an option. Aunt Eva pointed out that others went forward and did not take the cup or the bread, but instead received a blessing from the priest. That’s what Becca chose. 

She added that this church used actual bread instead of the usual Communion wafers, and that's when it happened. She told us about what she did when the priest offered her the bread, saying,  “The priest said, ‘This is the bread of Christ…’ I mean, he said, ‘This is the body of Christ…’”

The priest had said it correctly. Becca said it wrong while sharing the story with us. A very slight verbal faux pas. A tiny slip of the tongue. A nearly microscopic bobble. Less than minor. But we were like hyenas with a crippled gazelle and pounced on her helpless form. (Maybe not quite that viciously, but close.)

“The Bread of Christ? The Bread of Christ baked especially for you?” Then someone added, “If you liked manna, you’ll really like the Bread of Christ.” 

Suddenly, advertising slogans and phrases began bursting forth from the front seat and the back, each new twist bringing new roars of laughter. 

“What’s that heavenly aroma? It’s the Bread of Christ!” 

“Do you have any stone-ground Bread of Christ? No, because someone rolledthe stone away!”

Some might say we were cruel and insensitive, but it was beyond our ability to stop. The joke had taken on a life of its own. For fifteen miles, we rocked and rolled, hooting and guffawing. Eventually, Becca broke down and joined in, coming up with some one-liners of her own. She has a good sense of humor and recognizes a good joke when she hears one; this one was simply too good to ignore. 

“He made everything else in the world, and now He brings you: The Bread of Christ!”

“From the makers of manna comes a totally new taste…thousands of years in the making…it rises on the third day…” 

We couldn’t stop. We would drive silently for a minute or two, and then someone would quietly add another line, and all four of us would break up again. The eyeglasses came off, and the tears were wiped. No one drank anything for fear of someone saying something funny, which would cause a quick expulsion of liquid through the nasal passages. 

Some of you know what I mean when I say it was almost as delicious as getting the giggles in church. You know how it happens: You’re sitting in the pew, and the kids have been fidgeting and poking at each other, and you’ve had to shush them more times than you care to count. Suddenly, one of them does something silly but very covert, and both of them get uncontrollable giggles. Their shoulders jump up and down, and they try to hunker down in the pew a bit, so they’re not so noticeable to the minister. 

You try and shush them again, but you catch sight of the silly face/thing/drawing, and Wham! You’re sucked in, too, and now you’re part of the giggling throng. You try to maintain a stern face, but it’s nigh unto impossible. 

It’s even worse (better?) when both parents are drawn in. 

Those are memorable times.

That Sunday evening on the road back from Hinckley was memorable. It was a good time, a good family time. I like having times like that to round out the not-so-good times we occasionally have as children grow up and try their wings (along with their parents’ patience!). A week later, we still cracked up when someone said, “I could sure go for a slice of that Christ Bread…”

I just hope I can keep a straight face next time we have Communion in church, and the usher hands me the plate and says, 

“The body of Christ …”

Zimmy

Copyright © 2000 and 2026 by Michael K. Zimmerli. All rights reserved.